


Happy Birthday

by ooglywoogly



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, M/M, just two dads being dads, nothing but domestic fluff, this is the first non-smut fic ive ever posted lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 17:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7649287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ooglywoogly/pseuds/ooglywoogly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kyungsoo and Chanyeol celebrate their daughter's fifth birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Birthday

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tinycecropia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinycecropia/gifts).



Kyungsoo’s alarm rings. It’s Saturday, 4:30 AM. He rubs his eyes, blearily sits up, and starts his regular morning routine. He’s got filming this morning and wouldn’t want to be late, so he leaves silently and relatively quickly. But he gives out two kisses before he goes: one to the bedheaded tangle of gangly limbs still in the bed, and one to the birthday girl. He has a fleeting moment of sentimentality over his daughter,  _ their _ daughter, turning five years old, but he saves it for later. It’s too early to get sappy.

 

~

 

Chanyeol wakes up to something tugging on his shirt sleeve, someone quietly calling his name. He figures it’s Sunwoo, by the pronunciation. He doesn’t know anyone else that calls him “Chanyo”. He used to think it was weird at first, that she never called either of them “appa” and instead referred to them by their first names, but he figures that having two “appa”s might have gotten confusing anyway. She must have learned by hearing them call each other-- and if that’s the case, Chanyeol is glad it’s “Chanyo” and “Soo” instead of, say, “babe”, or “honey”, or any of the other pet names they use in front of her.

 

He snatches her up and pulls her onto the bed, into his arms. She giggles, more like a squeal. She was born from a surrogate mother, so she’ll look like Chanyeol but not Kyungsoo. She’s got his smile, full of one hundred teeth. And, of course, his ears.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“I’m hungry. Breakfast?”

“Yeah, sure thing. What do you want?”

“Eggs! Omelette, please.”

“One omelette, coming up. Do you know what  _ I _ want for breakfast?”

“What?”

“Bellybutton!”

He flips her onto her back and yanks up her shirt, blowing raspberries onto her tummy. She squeals again, kicking and smacking him in the face. She gets that from Kyungsoo, definitely.

  
  


In the kitchen, Sunwoo cracks the eggs into a bowl. Chanyeol picks out the bits of shell and starts beating them, and then pours it all into the pan. Once it’s done on one side, he flips it in the pan, like a pancake, because Sunwoo loves it. Chanyeol has taught her that food always tastes better when it’s cooked in a cool way.

 

As she’s stuffing ketchup-covered pieces of egg into her mouth, Chanyeol asks her if she remembers what today is.

“It’s my birthday!!” she shouts, still trying to chew at the same time. “I’m five now.”

“I know, I know. That’s so old, isn’t it?”

“Yeah! Almost as old as you. Do I have presents?”

“Of course you do. What kind of dads would we be if we didn’t give our daughter presents for her birthday?”

“Bad ones!”

“That’s right. But you can’t have them right now, you have to wait until Kyungsoo comes home, okay?”

She pushes the remaining ketchup around her plate with her fork, clearly annoyed, but she nods anyway.

 

~

 

They spend the rest of the morning doing various other activities. They run around in the backyard for a while, picking as many different kinds of leaves as they can find. They color with crayons, and Sunwoo draws a jumble of shapes and colors representing their family that somehow comes out looking much better than Chanyeol’s attempt at it. They make kimbap together for lunch, but the rolls were too loose and the fillings kept falling out, though they ate all the pieces anyway. After lunch, Sunwoo takes a nap while Chanyeol works on some stuff in his studio. 

Once she wakes up an hour or so later, she comes in and sits in his lap, and he shows her what he’s been working on. She doesn’t understand anything that’s on the screen, but she does get to hear what he’s got so far. While it was interesting at first, she gets bored very quickly.

 

“When is Soo gonna be home?”

“Any time now, I think.”

“Any time, or now?”

“‘Any time now’ means ‘soon’.”

“Oh. Okay.” She pauses, slumps back into Chanyeol. “He better hurry. I want my presents.”

“You’ll get them, don’t worry.”

She pouts, making whiny noises. “Okay.”

 

No less than two minutes later, as Sunwoo is playing with a guitar pick she found on Chanyeol’s desk, the sound of a door opening is heard from across the house. She jumps off Chanyeol’s lap and dashes out the door, Chanyeol trailing behind her.

Kyungsoo is on his way from the hallway into the kitchen when his legs get attacked by Sunwoo. His face is also attacked, but by Chanyeol, and much softer, and only with his lips. Kyungsoo bends over and picks Sunwoo up into his arms and carries her around as Chanyeol tells him about their day.

 

“She’s been so patient, Soo, it’s incredible,” Chanyeol coos while ruffling her hair.

“We can do presents now! Presents now!”

“Well, not anymore, apparently,” Kyungsoo says while setting her back down on the ground.

Chanyeol gets down on one knee, as to not be so far away, and says “Alright, Sunnie, go sit down on the couch and close your eyes and don’t open them until we say so. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You promise? You can’t get your presents if you open your eyes early, okay?”

“I promise!”

“Okay, then start… now!”

She bolts over to the couch, jumps onto it, and squeezes her eyes shut, putting her hands over them for good measure.

 

Chanyeol jogs to the back, grabbing a handful of bags and boxes out of their bedroom closet, and pops back into his studio to snatch up his guitar. Kyungsoo carefully takes a cake he baked last night off the top shelf of the fridge and grabs some matches out of a drawer. Sunwoo, true to her promise, has not opened her eyes.

Kyungsoo sets the cake on the coffee table and lights the candles, keeping close eye on Sunwoo to make sure she isn’t peeking. Chanyeol comes fumbling in to put the armful of presents down, almost dropping his guitar in the process.

 

“Okay,” Kyungsoo says sweetly, “You can open your eyes now.”

She throws down her hands and flashes open her eyes. She scans the gifts in front of her and squeals, feet kicking. Just then, Chanyeol strums on his guitar, and he and Kyungsoo launch into a beautiful rendition of “Happy Birthday”. Sunwoo’s teeth-filled smile is as big as ever.

“Blow out the candles, and don’t forget to make a wish,” Kyungsoo says at the end of their song, with Chanyeol reminding her “But you can’t tell us what it is or else it won’t come true!”

She closes her eyes and puts her hands together, and after a moment of wishing, blows out the candles as best as she can.

 

They cut the cake and eat it as Sunwoo opens her presents. Some are from family, but most are from Kyungsoo and Chanyeol. It’s a typical assortment: a doll, a stuffed elephant, some books. She opens a bag and pulls out a pretty white dress, one that Kyungsoo had told Chanyeol to buy the red version of since he was sure that it’d be covered in stains in under an hour; Kyungsoo just stares at Chanyeol, who shrugs and gives a facial expression that he hopes reads as “the white one was prettier, sorry”. Sunwoo loves it, though, and Kyungsoo guesses that he doesn’t mind that much as long as she’s happy. 

 

Sunwoo opens her last present, one Chanyeol and Kyungsoo were looking forward to the most. She pulls a very loud crescent-shaped object out of the box and stares at it for a while.

“It’s a tambourine,” Chanyeol tells her.

“Thank you,” she says with a flat expression as she puts it back in the box.

“She still doesn’t know what it is,” Kyungsoo says laughing.

“Here,” Chanyeol grabs the tambourine and puts it in her hands, “Shake it. Like this.”

They shake it together, hearing it jingle. She smiles and starts to shake it on her own, very loud and very off-beat.

“We better not regret this, Chanyeol.”

“Never.”

They sing happy birthday again, Chanyeol still on guitar as Kyungsoo helps Sunwoo match the beat. She’s not perfect, but she’s surprisingly good. Chanyeol is absolutely beaming with happiness.

 

~

 

Kyungsoo is in the kitchen making miyeokguk for dinner while Chanyeol and Sunwoo are still playing in the living room. They’re playing “zoo”, Sunwoo’s favorite pretending game, where she’s a zookeeper and she tells Chanyeol to be different animals that he then imitates.

 

“Elephant!”

Chanyeol positions his arm like a trunk and makes a very convincing elephant noise.

“What about the ears?”

“My ears are already big like an elephant’s.”

She finds that hilarious, and rolls on the floor laughing.

“Hey, kid, you’ve got big ears too.”

She covers her own ears and smiles. She hands him her new stuffed elephant. “This is your baby.”

“You’re already my baby elephant,” he says, snatching her up and making a loud trumpet sound right in her ears as she giggles.

Kyungsoo laughs from the kitchen, watching them over the counter that separates it from the living room.

“Come join us, babe, we could use another elephant,” Chanyeol calls over.

“I have to watch this, I don’t want it to get too hot.”

Chanyeol whines. “Awww, c’mon, it’s so fun. Please? I can’t believe this, my actor husband can’t even play an elephant.”

Kyungsoo snickers, shaking his head.

But Sunwoo shouts out “Please, Soo?” and before Chanyeol can even ask again, Kyungsoo’s already on his way over, galloping and making a not-so-convincing elephant noise. Chanyeol laughs so hard he falls over, and then Kyungsoo laughs out of embarrassment, and Sunwoo is laughing because her dads are laughing, and they all just turn into a puddle of giggles.

 

~

 

After dinner they eat more cake. Sunwoo gets her tambourine out again, and the three of them spend the rest of the night playing instruments and singing songs. Songs from the radio Sunwoo likes, cartoon theme songs, songs Chanyeol wrote, made up songs about elephants and pants and other silly things that make Sunwoo laugh so hard she can’t shake her tambourine anymore. Eventually Chanyeol and Kyungsoo end up a duet, singing slower older songs that Sunwoo doesn’t know as she dozes off on the floor.

 

After their last song, Kyungsoo picks up Sunwoo and carries her to bed. He kisses her forehead and wishes her another happy birthday.

 

~

 

Chanyeol and Kyungsoo are in their own bed now, scrolling through their phones to catch up on SNS before they sleep, a regular ritual. Usually they chat about anything interesting they see, so it’s a much more engaging activity than it seems.

 

Kyungsoo puts his phone down and turns to Chanyeol, taking a sigh.

 

“What’s wrong, Soo?”

“Nothing’s wrong, I’m just thinking about Sunwoo. She’s so old now. She can tie her own shoes. Y’know what she said a few days ago? I told her she was getting old, and she said ‘I’ve been getting old since I was born.’ She’s going to be a teenager before we know it and then she’ll be an adult and then, oh my god, we’ll be old men. She’ll be a grown person and we’ll be old men.”

“Christ, Soo, calm down. It only seems fast in retrospect, we still have a while to go.”

“I guess that’s true.”

 

They sit there for a while, looking into the darkness of the bedroom, and reach for each other’s hands. Chanyeol squeezes, and Kyungsoo squeezes back. At least they’ll be old men together.

 

Kyungsoo asks, “Did you ever think that we would be here? That we would be here, married, sitting in bed together, after having a fifth birthday party for our daughter?”

“Of course not. I can tell you without a doubt that the first time I met you in that practice room, I did not think that I’d have a kid with you.”

Kyungsoo shoves him with his shoulder, but he’s smiling. “Well of course not THAT long ago. I used to hate you back then. I thought you were so loud and annoying.”

“But you still thought I was hot, right?”

“Yeah, sure, twinky long-haired nothing-but-limbs-and-ears Chanyeol just rocked my socks off.”

“You’re so MEAN, Soo, and you’re also a liar, I  _ know _ you thought I was hot.”

“Do you remember when we first kissed? In my room?”

“Of course I do. I couldn’t sleep that night. I was so afraid of getting in trouble. I thought it was such a big deal, back then. Not just the kiss, us in general. Because, I mean… you know.”

“I know. I didn’t think that this could work, at first. I mean, not only were we idols, we were idols in the same group. I was so scared, Chanyeol. That’s why I used to get distant, sometimes. I was just scared. I know that dating happened but I didn’t just want to date you, I wanted to marry you. I didn’t want it to be temporary, or just for fun. I wanted to be with you for the rest of my life.”

“I was in the same mindset. I just always assumed that we couldn’t. That it would never work. That’s what made me love you more, I think, because the more I thought about it the more I realized that I couldn’t live without you.”

“Aigo,” Kyungsoo groans, “We sound like a drama.”

Chanyeol laughs, and then lets out a short sigh. “I’m just so thankful. That we’ve come this far. That Korea has come this far.”

“Me too.”

“I love you, Kyungsoo.”

“I love you too, Chanyeol.”

They squeeze each other’s hands again, and when Kyungsoo turns to Chanyeol he can see that his eyes are tearing up. He kisses him on the cheek.

And then Chanyeol starts blubbering. “I love us, I love our family. I love Sunwoo.”

Kyungsoo pats him on the back, and pulls him into a sideways hug. “I know, Chanyeol, I know. Me too.” Chanyeol buries his head into Kyungsoo’s shoulder and squeezes him tight. When he lets go, Kyungsoo kisses him.

“Sorry, I just got overwhelmed,” Chanyeol says, wiping under his eyes.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. You’re gonna make me cry too.”

Chanyeol apologizes, laughing. “But I’m not crying.”

“Sure, sure,” Kyungsoo teases, leaning over to turn off the bedside lamp.

 

“Goodnight, Chanyeol.”

“Goodnight, Kyungsoo.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”


End file.
